by Rick Partlow
"I have already made that point, Captain Dominguez," Mat said, voice and expression fatalistic and, as always, completely professional. "As, I'm sure, did Colonel Murdock before me. But the mission is what it is, and it's too late to change it now, so we will simply execute our orders to the best of our ability."
"Thank you, Major M'voba," Admiral Krieger inclined his head to Mat, showing him an odd respect that I wouldn't have predicted. "Yes, I admit, this operation is highly reliant on every piece meshing together just so. But our only alternative is to abandon the citizens of the Demeter colony to the tender mercies of their alien occupiers for the duration of this conflict. And I shouldn't have to add, if this doesn't work..." He shook his head. "Well, it will be very difficult to try a second time either on Demeter or anywhere else."
Fucking wonderful, Deke moaned and I saw him rub his face with his hands.
"You'll have plenty of time to review the plan en route," Krieger assured us. "But I'm afraid you'll have to leave within the next twelve hours in order to be in place in time."
"Twelve hours?" This time it was Holly that spoke up, disbelief in her voice. "But what about walk-through and rehearsals? Don't we get to coordinate with the Marines we'll be carrying?"
"You'll be picking them up en route as well," Krieger informed her, hands raised helplessly. "As I said, communication with the assets on Demeter is spotty. There was simply no other way to do it."
"There's no more time for questions," Colonel Murdock announced, standing and facing us. "Admiral Krieger has other oars in the water and he needs to tend to them. We have a job to do and we'll do it."
An antiphonal chorus of "Yes, sir" responded and we all fell silent. I still felt my gut roiling. This didn't feel right at all.
Murdock shot a look to Mat, who stood and faced us. "Group!" The shout was a prelude to a command and we all stood. "Attention!"
We snapped to attention, eyes facing straight ahead, but I could still see Colonel Murdock bracing and saluting Admiral Krieger. He returned the salute, then nodded to us and left the room, and his Marine guards turned to follow him down the corridor. Murdock kept us there at attention until the Admiral and his escort had entered the lift and the doors had closed.
"At ease," he barked with an uncharacteristic edge to his voice.
We stayed standing, our stance relaxing and our hands clasped behind our backs, our eyes on him.
"I know you don't like this," he said, looking as if he wanted to rage. "I know it because I don't like it. If this didn't come directly from the President, I think I'd have a chance to get it changed. It does and I don't. So, we do what we have to do." He looked over at Major Huntington. "Mark, give us the room for a minute."
Huntington looked a bit surprised, but he nodded and walked out, heading down to the lift station. Once he was gone, Murdock closed his eyes, taking a deep breath.
"What I'm going to tell you now never leaves this room. If things go pear-shaped out there, your number one priority is to bring your asses back here alive. Fuck the Marines, fuck the DSI and fuck the militia."
I felt my mouth drop open a little in shock. Murdock had never said anything like that to us before, and he never, ever cursed in front of us.
"Sir..." Mat began, his expression looking scandalized, but Murdock cut him off with a slash of his hand.
"Your continued existence as a force is more important to the war effort than the success of this half-assed mission. Am I coming through loud and clear?"
"Five by five, sir," Mat said, but he still sounded angry.
"You have twelve hours," Murdock told us. "Don't waste it." He jerked his head at the door. "Dismissed."
There wasn’t even the low muttering I’d normally have expected as we filed out; we grumbled to each other inside our heads now. I saw Daniela walking close to Mat, and they glanced at each other in a way that could have been regretful. Valeria was rolling her eyes at Reggie, probably at something he’d said in her head. And Holly was hand-in-hand with Brian, head resting against his shoulder. I blinked, actually missing a step.
You didn’t know? Deke asked me, having noticed my reaction I guess.
You should know better than anyone how clueless I am, I reminded him, feeling a bit numb. Is it serious?
No more serious than it was for you two, he told me, shrugging before we boarded the lift car. I don’t know that she does serious.
We weren’t the only ones noticing either.
“Guess you go for the thick guys, huh?” Reggie commented aloud, with a smirk.
“You’ll never know what I go for, asshole,” she said acerbically, shooting him a bird.
I snorted a laugh at that and I heard the others chuckling, including Brian. Still, it bugged me she was with him, not because she was with someone else but mostly because Brian was as big of an asshole as Reggie. Maybe Deke was right and she just wanted to keep things casual. Maybe that was why we weren’t together anymore, because I didn’t do casual.
The car arrived at the floor for our quarters and everyone else filed out, but I stayed behind. Deke turned back to me just outside the door, cocking an eyebrow curiously.
“You go ahead,” I said to him, pushing the button for a higher level. “I’m going to go see Jenna.”
“Be quick,” he told me, winking as the door closed. “Only got twelve hours.”
***
Jenna worked in a government complex not far from Sanctuary’s downtown area, in a department dedicated to Quantum Cryptography, and she’d rented an apartment nearby. Her shift had been ending when I called, so I waited for her in the public park across from her apartment building, sitting on a bench beneath the spreading boughs of a local tree-like growth and watching Proxima Centauri setting over the lake.
It was only a few minutes before I saw her coming up the pedestrian walk, a small backpack slung on her shoulder. It still felt odd seeing her in a Space Fleet uniform; there was part of me that would always picture her in that tight, white dress on the dance floor. But she was good at her job; though her job was not, as she’d reminded me since that night, being a spy for Colonel Murdock. He’d recruited her because he’d known I’d never met her; I had never been to the government offices in Sanctuary.
As I rose to greet her, I suddenly wondered if Murdock hadn't sent her to spy on me knowing she'd be bad at it...and knowing we might actually like each other. I wouldn't put it past him. I knew he kept close tabs on us; he probably had known immediately that Holly and I were done. I'm sure he knew everything quantifiable about my personality; you didn't shove this much raw funding into one individual unless you knew beforehand they were stable.
"I'm glad you're back," she said, smiling broadly and then kissing me. "Did you already eat dinner?"
"I'm afraid I don't have much time," I told her, pulling her against me and enjoying the way she felt as she settled her head against my shoulder. "We leave again early morning. I have to be back at the base in about eight hours to get ready."
"Jesus," she swore casually and I fought not to flinch from old habits. She looked me in the eye, her expression concerned and a bit outraged. "Why the hell are they sending you out again so soon?"
"It's big," I said. "I can't talk about the details, not even to you. But it'll be a few weeks this time, I think."
"Shit, Cal," she beat a fist softly against my chest. Then she shook her head, trying to smile again. "Okay, we have eight hours, I won't waste it bitching." She grabbed me by the collar of my uniform jacket and pulled me towards the entrance to her apartment. "Come on, let's get some dinner."
We did our best to not talk about anything momentous while we ate. Jenna had exchanged videos with her family and found out that her older sister had decided to have a baby; her mother was talking about having another as well, it having been more than the requisite twenty years since the last one. Apparently, the Orbitals were fairly strict about population control. She showed me the video later, in bed, and I was struck by how different she
looked from both of her parents. Her mother was impossibly tall and skinny, her skin brown and her hair tightly curled; while her dad was a shorter, broad-shouldered man with carrot-red hair and pale skin.
Then I remembered this was the Orbitals: every baby was constructed from the genes up, especially if you ever wanted them to walk around on a one-gravity planet. There were no natural births or unplanned pregnancies there. Jenna was exactly as they'd designed her, which I thought said something for their good taste.
"Must be weird having a sister twenty years older than you," I said later, my fingertips tracing lazy lines on the pale, bare skin of her stomach. "My older brother is only seven years ahead of me and he still acts like a bossy dickhead."
She chuckled throatily at that, rolling onto her side and draping an arm across my chest, nuzzling into my shoulder. "Adriana was off at university before I was born," she told me. "I honestly barely know her. My real brothers and sisters were the kids in my Learning Clutch."
"What the hell's a Learning Clutch?" I asked automatically, but then realized I knew it as soon as I'd thought about it thanks to my headcomp, my neurolink and the public network in Sanctuary. I let her explain anyway, trying to be polite.
"It's how kids are raised in the Orbitals," she told me, smiling at the memory. "All the children in a certain age range are grouped together and spend most of their day being mentored by human caretakers and also taught by ViR and other means of interactive learning. We spent a lot of time just playing with each other, of course. As we got older, we were encouraged to group by hobbies and chosen sports or activities as well. I really miss the Clutch." She let out a sighing breath. "I hardly keep in touch with any of them anymore. They're all over the place now."
"Doesn't anyone stay in the Orbitals after they grow up?" I asked her, my mind starting to drift away from the subject as she moved against me teasingly.
"They encourage emigration," she whispered in my ear, then followed the words with her tongue and I made a sound deep in my throat. "Otherwise it would get too crowded and strain resources."
I abandoned the conversation then, lips meeting hers and hands pulling her beneath me.
The hours passed by quickly, and we finished them together in her shower, making love one last time. For all I knew, it might be the last time.
Then I was in the doorway of the apartment with her, saying goodbye. The stars were out, Proxima still hours from rising, and she'd had no sleep thanks to me. I knew she had a shift in a few hours and I felt bad about that, but she hadn't exactly been shy and retiring either.
She was dressed in a T-shirt and nothing else and didn't seem to care as she stood there, arms around my neck; there was no one out at this time of the early morning anyway, and it was quite the image to keep in my head for the next few weeks. I could feel the warmth of the bare skin of her legs through my utility pants and I wanted more than anything else to carry her back to her bed again, but I'd already pushed it too close to the edge and I had to go.
"Please come back," she said to me, and I saw her blinking hard as she tried not to cry.
"I've got orders not to get killed," I told her honestly, kissing her eyes and tasting a hint of salt.
I felt the words "I love you" welling up in my chest, but I didn't say them. They wouldn't come out and I wondered if maybe it was because I was afraid to make the mistake I'd made with Holly and get too serious too quick.
When I get back, I promised myself. I'll tell her when I get back.
And if I didn't get back, it was probably better she didn't hear it.
"I'll see you in a few weeks," I promised instead.
She said nothing, just waved at me once as I walked away.
Chapter Fifteen
I didn’t bother trying to tough it out this time; I let my biofeedback loop sooth my claustrophobia enough to make the ride down in the drop pod bearable. Knowing it was real this time somehow made it less restrictive instead of more and I didn’t know why. The ride down was smooth as you could get in a capsule that small and the Tahni didn’t shoot at us. Maybe that’s why the tiny enclosure didn’t bother me; I was more worried about being blown out of the sky.
But we floated down unharmed, touching down as planned in the swampy flood plain of a major river, right where it butted up against the forest. Then the plan went all to hell.
Is it just me, Deke said, yanking at his seat restraints as the entire capsule began a shuddering roll, or are we fucking sinking?
I didn’t respond, just flipped up the cover on the switch and pulled it, blowing the upper section off the pod and letting in a flood of murky water that felt cold even through my Reflex armor. I tried not to panic, knowing I could go without breathing for a few minutes if necessary, just moved as quickly as possible in the flooding half of a drop pod, grabbing my combat harness and pulse carbine, then bracing a foot against my seat and jumping clear.
The night was dead black, the moons and stars cloaked behind roiling storm clouds, and the only illumination came from an occasional flash of lightning in the middle distance. Even with my vision enhancements, I could barely see even a few meters around me, so it was blind luck that I caught the protruding tree root and didn’t sink just as deep into the muck as the ill-fated drop pod. I heard a muted squawk behind me and a splash, and I thought for a second that I was going to have to dive into the flooded morass and fish Deke out, but then he was next to me, clinging to the same tree.
It was a cypress, planted here a century ago when the first humans had come through the jumpgate to establish Amity, the first city of the Demeter colony. The ecosystem had been rudimentary on the world, but it had proven perfect for introducing slightly-engineered versions of Earth flora and fauna, and as of a year ago, it had been one of the most successful of the Commonwealth worlds. People actually came here for vacations, which was outlandishly expensive, and the extensive wilderness that had grown up in that hundred years was like a nature preserve, not just for Earth wildlife as it existed now but for extinct species brought back via genetic engineering.
Here could be found mastodons and smilodons, dodos and elephant birds, and a variety of other animals whose genetic material we’d retrieved from preserved remains. They lived in the wild, kept out of human areas by sonic barriers. And now, of course, we were walking through their territory like we owned it. Well, wading if not walking.
We hauled ourselves out of the depression where the drop pod had sunk and onto firmer ground, where the fetid water only reached up to our knees. I took a deep breath and pulled my combat harness on, fastening its catches and then checking on my pulse carbine. It hadn’t taken any damage, so I fastened its retractable sling into the harness and turned back to Deke. I could barely see him, even on infrared and thermal.
Ready?
Let’s get this shit show on the road, farm-boy.
He sounded as fatalistic and bitter as he had the whole trip out here. None of us were happy about this; not even counting that it violated Op Sec all to hell, that it put all of our eggs in one basket and then set the fucking basket on fire, and that it counted on timing that maybe happened in movies but sure as hell not in actual combat, it wasn’t at all what we were designed for or trained for.
They should have sent just us to take out the reactor. We wouldn’t have even needed to circumvent security, we just could have snuck in and done it.
I sighed. Now I was repeating Deke’s complaining inside my own head, as if I hadn’t heard it enough pretty much nonstop for ten days on the trip out here. I concentrated on following the dead-reckoning map in my headcomp; there were actually GPS satellites in orbit here, but we didn’t trust them since the Tahni might have monkeyed with their software.
The ground got higher and dryer after we entered the forest, the oaks towering over us when we left the stands of cypress behind. Moss hung nearly invisible from their wide-spread limbs and brushed at us as we passed, making me flinch over and over until I got used to it. I could still kind of
perceive my surroundings from the way sounds echoed between the trees, my wetware filling in the details for me as shaded outlines in my vision. Then the rain began to fall, gently at first but strengthening quickly into a deluge, and I couldn’t even count on my sonic analysis to get a sense of what was around me.
At least the Tahni won’t be able to see shit in this soup either, I commented hopefully to Deke, grunting involuntarily as I tripped over a root and stumbled forward a step.
They’re probably smart enough to be somewhere warm and dry, he countered.
I thought that was kind of whining, since the Reflex armor sealed us against the rain by closing its natural pores to an airtight seal. It still got damp inside them from sweat, though, and since there was nowhere else for the sweat to go with the pores sealed, it felt clammy and uncomfortable. Also, the heavy rain began to turn the loamy ground into soft mud that sucked at our boots and slowed us to a crawl and we still had kilometers to go on foot, and…
Okay, maybe he wasn’t just whining. This really did suck. I wondered how the others were doing. Holly and Brian were supposed to meet up with us and the DSI agents in just a few hours to coordinate the militia’s diversion attack, while Mat and Reggie, Kel and Cowboy, and Daniela and Valeria were ferrying Marines down in their stealthships. I wouldn’t have wanted that job; getting one ship through the sensor net was hard enough, much less trying to land three in close enough proximity for troops to hook up for an operation. Plus, those were small ships, and crowding a squad of Marines into each of them for the four days it had taken them to get here from the closest outpost… I shuddered at the thought of how packed it must have been and how bad it must have smelled.
Mat was in charge of that end of the mission, and I found it amusing that a twenty-four-year-old Major was ordering around the thirty-year-old Marine Captain who led the Force Recon platoon. I wished we could try contacting him and the others, but the only way at this distance would be to bounce a signal off one of the communications satellites in orbit, and there was too great a chance the Tahni were monitoring them. We wouldn’t risk it until the Marines were assaulting the reactor complex and the cat was out of the bag.